My brain: "You have so many in-progress projects you should work on finishing."
My brain: "..."
My brain: "Time to start another new project".
This will be a three-rail voltage and current monitor for #Eurorack systems. It has two displays so you will be able to see everything at once, and can have graphs and other fun visualizations.
And I'll be able to use it as base to connect to other modules via UART when I need an extended UI.
Here's the backing board that sits behind the LCD modules. Having this board allows me to only use four screws to hold the LCDs in place, instead of eight.
This is the main processor board for the power meter. It drives the two LCDs, manages the encoder input, and connects to the power board (yet to be laid out) via I2C.
@ve7fim I understand the simplicity of using the INAxxx current measuring ADCs with i2c output… but wouldn’t a circuit with a lot of opamps, a mux for input scanning and one standalone ADC be more fitting to the whole “synthesizer” theme? 😉
I was originally going to solve the problems associated with monitoring the negative rail by using an inverting op-amp, and use the muxed ADC in the microcontroller to read the current/voltages, but this approach had a lower BOM cost, and is a lot easier to reach the desired level of accuracy. Plus, it's a simpler calibration.
@ve7fim@keelan I wonder when someone will come up with an AI thingy that actually helps in EDA. I don't know of anyone trying for schematics. There are a few startups trying to do that for layouts, but I don't think anything useful has come out of them yet.
It's not a half-bad application. Train it on the tens of thousands of beautifully laid out schematics from old HP manuals, and let it make suggestions for your layout.
@ve7fim@keelan I was thinking more like scraping github, since I think you'd have to first OCR and vectorize all those HP manuals. For layouts I know of at least one startup that was visibly hurting for training data. They had a deal on their website like "we'll manually lay out your board for really cheap if you let us keep the result as training data". (they didn't exactly phrase it like that, but the terms and conditions made clear that's what was happening)
I suspect that a lot of that sort of training is already going on with some of the PCB houses that also do assembly, since they have better quality metadata for training a layout/auto-router.
One of the reasons I use JLCPCB is because they don't use boards for this sort of thing: (1/2)
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I need to create a new spacer (I had to take the clippers to an older board to make it fit), and lay out the sensor board, but this should be good enough for me to start working on the UI and get most of the software developed.
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